Are We There Yet? Four weeks left until the American elections of 2016 are over
Gerald Ford once referred to Watergate as “our long national nightmare”. There must be millions of Americans who think the same of their national elections this year and just wish that they were over. Four weeks today and we should know the outcomes for the White House and, crucially, Congress.
A campaign that seemingly could not take any more twists and turns did so at the weekend as, first, some of Hillary Clinton’s private speeches on Wall Street were leaked, only for that to then be eclipsed by the release of a 2005 tape of Donald Trump offering what was virtually a user’s guide to sexual assault for the rich and famous.
For a day or so it looked as if the Trump candidacy may be teetering on the very edge of collapse, with a critical mass of senior Republicans about to desert him and demand collectively that he stand down, but the combination of a solid performance in the second presidential debate, which exceeded his badly reviewed efforts in the first one, and the sheer practical difficulties of replacing a contender for the White House at this hour when ballot papers have already been printed in many states and absentee votes cast, seems to have steadied the ship.
There is, though, still time for yet more uncontrolled explosions in this surreal contest. It is easily the most raucous since 1968 when the backdrop of the Vietnam War, combustible race relations, urban riots and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Senator Robert Kennedy created a volatile electoral cocktail. The two leading candidates, ex-Vice President Richard Nixon and Vice President Hubert Humphrey, were, however, both manifestly qualified to serve in the Oval Office and were capable of being civilised in their remarks about each other. In terms of taste, therefore, 2016 has been far, far worse than 1968 and even the crude politics of the 1820s and 1830s probably cannot match it. If the sounds of Founding Fathers turning in their graves were audible, they would deafen.
Even before the latest set of salacious revelations, the dynamics of the race had been shifting. After a very bad month up to and including her highly publicised health malfunction at the 11 September commemoration ceremonies, Mrs Clinton had been slowly adding to her lead in the polls, eking her way to something closer to a four percentage point lead rather than the two-point average margin that she had fallen back to. She had been assisted in this in part simply by looking better but also by a strong performance in the first debate in which she appeared to have far greater command of the policy facts than her rival. The odds on her prevailing had moved backed to in excess of 70%. In the immediate aftermath of the Trump Tape’s arrival the number has nudged toward 75%.
What might be the wider impact of the latest chapter in the saga be for the result of the elections?
The Trump Tape largely reinforces his existing difficulties rather than create new challenges
The Republican contender already had a reputation for a dismissive attitude towards women, and the female electorate in the US had already responded in kind. The gender gap in this campaign is at record levels. Within the actual or potential Republican voter pool in the US there are, to simplify drastically, three camps of citizen: those whose affinity is based on cultural conservatism; those whose allegiance is rooted in faith-based conservatism and those whose alignment is largely the result of economic conservatism (support for low taxes and scepticism about government spending).
Mr Trump’s strongest support has come from cultural conservatives who are often relatively poor, disproportionately male and frequently rural or small town in location. They are going to stick with him. The various scandals surrounding him often serve to solidify his status as an outsider to them. Faith-based conservatives might recoil at his comments on women and a few might abandon him but as a rule they feel a strong civic obligation to vote and they loathe Mrs Clinton and her husband. There may be a lot of swallowing hard but they will back Mr Trump in sufficient numbers ultimately.
It is the economic conservative cohort, which tends to be affluent (perhaps unsurprisingly), highly educated, more urban, culturally modern and frequently socially quite liberal, which has always been the weak spot for the Trump candidacy. Recent events are likely to make it even harder for him to convince such voters that they should disregard their doubts about him and vote for his party label. It is the extent of their revolt, or not, which will in the end be the determining factor in this contest.
The importance of this is magnified by the Electoral College of states that determines the outcome. Mr Trump’s difficulty from the outset (which is probably more problematic now) is that he needs to appeal simultaneously to two different blocks of competitive states if he is to win the White House.
The first of these is in the Mid-West and consists of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and, at a stretch, Wisconsin. These are all states which have been traditionally Democratic and which have been in remorseless decline for some decades. His ‘anti-politics’ and culturally conservative themes mean that he is more credible than Mitt Romney was to voters here.
Yet at the same time he also has to be sure of carrying the likes of Florida, North Carolina and Virginia (he could be vulnerable in Georgia too), which are states which have seen expanding populations on the back of booming economies that have shifted decisively in to the service sector and high-end tech. Voters here are not angry and do not deem international trade to have bedevilled them. The economic conservative section of the Republican vote is well established here.
If Mrs Clinton sweeps all these states, she is home and dry. It is a similar story in the smaller competitive states in the western United States, such as Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada, all of which have growing (and more Hispanic) electorates. Mr Trump is relying on securing a notably high percentage of the white (male) vote to triumph in such places. It is not impossible, but he is leaving it very late to convert enough economic conservatives.
What about the congressional elections?
The real fear of Republican Party elites is that Mr Trump will not only lose but will cost his party control over the US Senate. All sides accept that bar a spectacular meltdown, the US House of Representatives will remain in Republican hands. The Senate, where the Democrats only need to win four seats, assuming they take the Oval Office, is a different matter. Control over the Senate matters for two main reasons.
First, in terms of the ‘offence versus defence’ of Washington politics, if the Democrats control both the presidency and the House, then they are in the driving seat, whereas if a Democratic President has to share authority with a uniformly Republican Congress (as President Obama has done for the past two years) then Capitol Hill will take the lead on domestic policy with the President reduced to a strategy based on the threat of the veto.
Second, the Senate has the final say on Cabinet appointments, nominations to the federal judiciary including the Supreme Court and has a sizeable influence over foreign policy. Mrs Clinton would have a far easier life if her party had a majority (if tiny) in this chamber. The fate of the Senate is on a knife-edge with two Democratic gains in Illinois and Wisconsin looking likely and a series of ultra-close contests in Republican-held seats in Indiana, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Pennsylvania plus a Democratic seat in Nevada.
The agony for the Republican Party elite is that it could all have been so different. Mrs Clinton has turned out to be a more exposed contender than almost anyone once thought as Senator Sanders showed in the primary campaign and even Mr Trump has proved to a degree. If their candidate had been Senator Mario Rubio or Governor John Kasich it is reasonable to assume that they would have won the White House and retained Congress. Instead, they are now desperate to keep the Senate.
